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As it has grown, Y Combinator’s Hacker News has struggled to keep its comment threads relevant, thoughtful, and above all else, friendly. Like YouTube, Reddit, and other sites with a large community of commenters, popular threads on Hacker News can degrade into grandstanding, arguments for the sake of being argumentative, and ad hominem attacks with little or no actual substance.

In an effort to improve the quality of discussions that crop up on Hacker News, Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham yesterday announced some imminent changes to the way comments would be posted and appear on the site. In what could be one of Graham’s last big moves*, he’s implementing a new “pending comments” system at Hacker News.

Under the new system, comments that are submitted will no longer be immediately posted to the site, but will instead be placed in a pending comments queue until seen and approved by multiple Hacker News users who have over time accumulated more than 1,000 karma points. Those users will be able to endorse pending comments, in addition to flagging them for removal.

The goal is to get users to post comments that are substantial without being mean-spirited. In his post, Graham cautions against “throwaway remarks” and those that include “gratuitous nastiness.” He also warns that people who regularly endorse comments that fail either of those tests will lose their ability to endorse comments in the future.

While implemented to improve the quality of comments, a fair amount of discussion that followed questioned whether the system would work actually work. And not everyone seems happy about it — in particular, how quickly the change is being implemented and without a whole lot of warning, and how it puts more responsibility into the hands of high-karma users.

In a Medium post on the change, Jonas Wisser (who admittedly is not a Hacker News user) warns that since moderation is being done by those who are most deeply invested in how Hacker News currently operates, it’s likely to remain more or less the same:

This new system is designed to improve the quality of comments on Hacker News. But to me, it seems like it will result in more of the same, but with less dissent. And more of the same, but with less dissent, is not something I’ve ever been able to trust.

Like many big changes of this type, we won’t know how the change will actually affect the quality of comments or engagement in the community until it’s actually implemented and adopted. Until then, however, it’s at least an interesting experiment in community and comment moderation.

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* PG notes in the blog post that he’s checking out of HN at the end of this YC cycle.

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OverviewY Combinator is a startup accelerator based in Mountain View, CA.
In 2005, Y Combinator developed a new model of startup funding. Twice a year they invest a small amount of money ($120K) in a large number of startups (most recently 68). The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months. The YC partners work closely with each company to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to …

BioPaul Graham is a co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator in Mountain View, California. He is also a programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist.
Graham is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first ASP, which in 1998 became Yahoo! Store. In 2002, he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm …